Tips From 4 Home Brewers Who Turned Pro

Jim Koch, founder of the Boston Beer company and creator of Sam Adams Boston Lager, is officially a billionaire. While these brewers aren't creeping up the Forbes lists just yet, they have plenty of advice for home beermakers trying to follow their dream.

Heretic Brewing Company

Heretic Brewing Company

Brewer: Jamil Zainasheff

His Advice: Practice.

Zainasheff was introduced to home brewing simply enough. In 1999 he went over to a neighbor's house, and when they cracked open their beers, Zainasheff took a sip and was blown away. When he asked where the neighbor got the beer, he got an answer that would ferment a new hobby: "I made that."

When Christmas rolled around, Zainasheff's wife gave him a Mr. Beer kit. "The first batch I made was absolutely horrible," he says. "It didn't taste anything at all like what I expected, but pretty quickly I got the hang of it and became quite good at it."

Zainasheff began going to the local home-brew shop and asking what he should make next. Then Zainasheff decided to go through the list of Beer Judge Certification Program beers and make every one of the 70 to 80 styles listed. Practice made perfect. From 2002 on his submissions in the American National Homebrew Competitions won first place in every category. In 2007 he won his second American Homebrewers Association Ninkasi Award for best overall brewer.

In 2010 he decided to go pro.

"Every home-brewer dreams of selling their beer commercially, but I never thought I would, just because brewing is a business," he says. "It's a lot of hard work in a manufacturing business."

He had little interest in running a brewpub or restaurant—Heretic is exclusively a brewery. Through the fan network of his home-brewing podcast "The Jamil Show," he secured distribution.

So far his market is small—California, Idaho, Japan, and Australia. He's just broken into the San Francisco market, and his eye is on Oregon, Washington, and Colorado.

"The demand keeps growing for our products, and we keep getting requests for our beers in more and more places," Zainasheff says.

Dogfish Head Brewery

Dogfish Head Brewery

Brewer: Sam Calagione

His Advice: Think big and stay the course.

In 1993 Dogfish Head Brewery founder Sam Calagione passed by a neighborhood bodega in Manhattan and picked up a few ripe cherries. At home he had a pale ale ready to brew. But now he had a way to play up what would be his "virgin batch."

"That beer turned out really good, and I stood up in front of all my roommates and said, This is what I want to do with my life—brew beers using exotic ingredients," Calagione says. "And then my next couple batches of beer were not so good, but I had already told everyone that was what I was going to do with my life and stuck to it."

When Calagione opened the Dogfish Head Pub in Rehoboth Beach, Del., in 1995, he had $220,000—$110,000 raised from his dad, his orthodontist, someone for whom he had done construction work, plus a matching fund of bank loans. Exotic ingredients were flying around in his head, along with the dream of making a food-centric beer, eschewing the English- and German-style beers then in vogue in the craft-brewing market. The pub started out with three beers: Pumpkin Ale, made from brown sugar, pumpkin meat, allspice, and cinnamon; Chicory Stout, made from chicory, licorice root, and organic Mexican coffee; and Immort Ale, made from maple syrup, vanilla beans, and juniper berries. It was the smallest commercial brewery in the nation.

Dogfish's expansion started small, taking the Pumpkin Ale to Delaware's famous Punkin Chunkin competition. But his sights were bigger. "It was always my goal to grow and distribute my beers coast-to-coast, even when we were tiny," he says.

Initially, Dogfish head was only available in Delaware, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. The brewery barely stayed afloat.

"Our production brewery lost money from 1997 to 1999," Calagione says, "and I had to use all the profits from our restaurant brewery just to keep our production brewery from going out of business—there wasn't a big market for wood-aged, maple-syrup infused, 13-percent alcohol beers like Immort Ale in 1996 or 1997. But we never dumbed down our beers or discounted them, and that small group of adventurous, off-center drinkers grew each year."

In 2000 Dogfish Head launched two more of its mainstays, the Raison D'Etre (beet sugar and raisins) and the Midas Touch (muscat grapes, saffron, and thyme honey.) It was the first year the brewery drew a profit—though certainly not the last.

Today new experiments abound. They've been importing palo santo wood for a brewing vessel, a South American wood that helps add caramel and spice notes to the beer, improving on oak aging's toast and vanilla. It's the biggest wooden brewing vessel in America since prohibition. Also, Dogfish is getting cedar scraps from a Maine surfboard company to age beer.

"To this day, we don't look to the brewing industry for inspiration; we don't want to be influenced by what other breweries do," Calagione says.